1. The US murder rate is down an 12% year-to-date, based on 90 cities that have released data.

If the trend holds it will be the single largest annual decline in the murder rate ever recorded.

And yet, you probably haven't heard anything about it.

๐Ÿงต

@juddlegum

I don't understand why you think any of that data is credible.

Your journalistic colleagues have reported scandal after scandal after scandal where cops have manipulated reported crime rates to make police departments look effective at deterring crime.

Ours is a society in which there are literal tens of thousands of unanalyzed rape kits on back shelves of PDs in major cities around this country.

Ours is a society in which women of color go missing - especially Native American women - and no law enforcement thinks it worth wondering where they went.

Ours is a society in which police departments have been caught refusing to accept reports of violent crime while manufacturing petty charges to artificially make it look like "Broken Windows" policing works.

@juddlegum

Ours is a society in which something like 95% of criminal charges result in a plea deal which has the effect of the statistical record of crime showing the less-violent pleas and not the actual crimes committed.

Ours is a society that's developed superb medical responses to gunshot wounds, so a whole lot of what would have been murders are rendered, by the grace of medical intervention, merely assault.

How can anyone believe we have the faintest notion of how much violent crime there is?

@siderea @juddlegum I suspect that stats on such things are similarly distorted in Canada.